I hooked up the old computer to the router so it’d have internet, turned it on, and got the disk in before it went to boot. It happily loaded up the Ubuntu Server installation splash screen, and the install went without a hitch. Once that I was done, I rebooted and did a quick ifconfig to make sure internet was working and to check the IP address. Back on my laptop, I tried to ssh in from my laptop… and it worked just fine. The server has a preconfigured OpenSSH server set up, so I didn’t have to mess with the settings on that. I set up ssh keys so I didn’t have to password everything, and tested everything with a rsync backup. It worked perfectly, and there was much rejoicing.

Specifically, factoring trinomials where a is greater than one (assuming the form ax2+bx+c).

Everyone hates these. You can’t factor them using the method normally taught in school, so many teachers just teach “Guess and Check” for this type of trinomial, in the hopes that they’ll get good enough at guessing and checking.

This is dumb.

There IS a method to factor this sort of trinomials; it’s called The British Method. It’s the only memorable thing my Algebra II teacher taught me. Ready? Here we go.

On a recent coding project I’ve been working on, I had need for a simple line-wrapping method. I googled around, but couldn’t find anything useful — so, like any coder, I made my own. I think it’s pretty nice, if I do say so myself:

That first “in.indexOf()” has the space string (” “) as an argument, not an empty string.

I apologize for the difficult-to-read-ness of this code; I had it nicely spaced and indented but WordPress ate my formatting.
If you want to be really fancy, switch out the “\n” with a System.getProperties(line.separator).

Okay, first of all, I realize I have posted anything in nearly three months. This has no excuse; I am shamed. SHAMED.

Anyways.

So, I was thinking, I want to do another computer-y post. But then I thought about how so far I’ve really just done software reviews and stuff — and it’s not like that doesn’t already exist elsewhere. I don’t need to reinvent the wheel. So I decided to post something more original — two gedit themes I created.

gedit (all lowercase, always) is the default GNOME text editor. It handles syntax highlighting, line numbers, margins, adjustable tab width… it’s pretty full-featured. Visually, it starts out pretty basic but it’s got great plugin support and some pretty good built-in color themes. However, all of them had something that bugged me; I decided to fix it.

Click through for large size!

My first theme, Oblivion++, is based off the ships-with-gedit theme Oblivion. It’s much bluer.

You can download the .xml file here or view it here; scroll to the bottom of the post for installation instructions.

This one has a large size too -- click it!

My other theme is Vim Stylin’, based off Vim color interpretations. You can download the .xml here or view it here, just like the other. Also just like the other, scroll to the bottom of the post for installation instructions.

If you do want one of these (if I do say so myself) pretty cool themes, download them to ~/.gnome2/gedit/styles, which may need to be created first.

gedit, as far as I know, works on Linux, Mac OS, and Windows, but comes with and works best on Linux. If you have gedit on a non-linux OS, the file location will be different; it /should/ work okay from somewhere else but I haven’t tested it.

Once it’s downloaded and saved, open gedit. In the menu bar choose Edit and navigate to Preferences. Once there, click Fonts & Colors and click the Add button. Navigate to and choose the downloaded theme; it should change immediately.

Enjoy!

Edit: The text in the images is a bit of the code of Keylime Py, a fail-pun-named text-based adventure game I’m writing in python. I’ll be blogging about it once it’s ready to be let out to teh interwebs.

Email harvesting bots — also known as data miners — trawl the internet for anything that looks like an email address. When they find one, they send spam to said address. They then search the site on which the email was found and search everything linked to there. The good people at the Office of Strategic Influence have created a site with a script that generates gigabytes of fail email messages (like “qzloxqsiy@rluzuhv.net”) and have handily provided links to it. Whenever this site, or any other site that links to the script, is found by an email harvester, the harvester also checks the script-hosting site. And dies. They can’t handle the millions of fake emails. Death to spam!

Some of you may have heard of Whitelines, a kind of graph paper with white lines on a light gray background. It’s great; your nice axes (the plural of axis) don’t get ﻿obscured by heavy lines. It’s also kinda expensive, $9.50 for 160 spiral-bound pages. That’s about six cents per page. Well, you can print your own, here (it’s called “inverted graph paper”), for about four cents per page (about three cents of ink per page, and about a cent of paper per page). I like line thickness at 0.5 and color at #DEDEDE.

For Us, The Living by Robert Heinlein; Perry Nelson gets into a car crash in 1939 and wakes up in 2086. The world has completely changed, and Perry must get accustomed to a new society and economy. Heinlein’s first book, it’s really more of a description of an ideal society than a real novel — but it happens to make an excellent book.

Digital Fortress by Dan Brown; Susan Fletcher, a codebreaker for the NSA, is employed to help crack a code that the NSA cannot break — an unprecedented event. She is shot at and betrayed by even the NSA itself in her quest to solve the code before a worm hidden in it demolishes the NSA’s firewalls and cripples the United States.

Star Wars: Tales of the Bounty Hunters compiled and edited by Kevin J. Anderson; features the stories of five of the bounty hunters hired to capture Han Solo.

Maskerade by Terry Pratchett; another of the Discworld books, the Ghost in the opera house in Ankh-Morpok goes insane and starts killing people. Granny Weatherwax and Nanny Ogg, witches from Lancre, must stop him because after all — the show must go on!

The Chronicles of Chrestomanci: Volume I by Diana Wynne Jones; several stories about Chrestomanci, a nine-lived enchanter who presides over the magical world. Very, very, good. Also, I think, better than Volume II.

Heavy Weather by Bruce Sterling; storm chasers in the future — the Storm Troupe — are following the possible formation of a F-6 tornado, which is impossible in today’s weather and climate. They use VR gear and military surplus AI’d vehicles to chase the storms. None of them, however, (not even their brilliant leader, Dr. Mulcahey) imagined the actuality of the F-6 and what happened in its wake.